Under the right circumstances, a brave freethinker can rescue a fundamentalist society and lead it away from oppressive religion. That’s what Mustafa Kemal Atatürk did for Muslim Turkey in the 1920s and 1930s.

When I came of age in the 1950s, deep in Appalachia’s Bible Belt, narrow-minded sanctimony prevailed. It was a crime for stores to open on the Sabbath. It was a crime to buy a cocktail or a lottery ticket any day. Boot­leggers and “numbers” runners were nailed by cops. You could be jailed for looking …

When I came of age in the 1950s and slowly began to think about life, I developed a strange feeling that the world is senseless, irrational, and chaotic. Forty million people had just been killed in World War II, and everyone said how noble and heroic it was. The “Big One” was only the latest …

Some American cities are suffering a new problem: abandoned churches. The Philadelphia Inquirer recently reported that officials in the City of Brotherly Love can’t cope with once-stately temples that “decay into neighborhood eyesores.” “There are now so many shuttered houses of worship – at least 300 estimated across the Philadelphia region – that anxiety over …

The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, by Stephen Greenblatt (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011, ISBN 978-0-393- 06447-6) 356 pp. Hardcover, $26.95. Distinguished Harvard University professor Stephen Greenblatt contends that rediscovery of the lost Lucretius poem, De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), helped trigger the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, and …

Historical awareness is woefully spotty. Everyone knows that World War II killed perhaps forty million people. But few have ever heard of a bizarre religious war that inflicted similar slaughter. China’s Taiping Rebellion in the mid-1800s was the bloodiest civil war in human history and possibly the worst conflict of any type, depending on whose …

Few people notice, but a profound shift is discernible in history and current trends. Secular humanist values—rooted in improving people’s lives without supernaturalism—are gaining ground, decade after decade, century after century. They’re becoming the standard of civilization, overcoming past ugliness. Evidence confirms that wars are diminishing, democracy is spreading, dictatorships are fading, health is improving, …

The sea of faith Was once, too, at the full, and round Earth’s shore Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled But now I only hear Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, Retreating. . . . — Matthew Arnold, “Dover Beach” A historic transition is occurring, barely noticed. Slowly, quietly, imperceptibly, religion is shriveling …

Incredibly, President George W. Bush told French President Jacques Chirac in early 2003 that Iraq must be invaded to thwart Gog and Magog, the Bible’s satanic agents of the Apocalypse. Honest. This isn’t a joke. The president of the United States, in a top-secret phone call to a major European ally, asked for French troops …

In 1988, fundamentalist Christians in several nations vented rage and violence because a movie, The Last Temptation of Christ, portrayed Jesus as a wavering human who lusted for the prostitute Mary Magdalene. A Paris theater showing the film was firebombed, sending thirteen people to hospitals. Another, at Besancon, France, suffered a similar attack. Tear gas …

Behold the age-old antagonism toward all things sexual Christian endeavor,” H. L. Mencken wrote, “is notoriously hard on female pulchritude.” He was right, of course, and he should have included Jewish endeavor and Muslim endeavor in his observation. Western religions have spent millennia inflicting shame, guilt, repression, and punishment upon human sexuality—especially women’s sexuality. Asian …

Sincere seekers of reliable knowledge lost a friend when Carl Sagan died too young at sixty-two. Like all good scientists, the brilliant Cornell astronomer spent his life pursuing secrets of nature, looking for facts that can be documented, tested, and retested. Like some maturing thinkers, he decided late in life to escalate his criticism of …

Few Americans know that Thomas Jefferson wrote, in a letter to John Adams: The day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a vir-gin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter. Or that …